AP's leadership change explains the hackery

Apparently the AP's recent stretch of shamelessly pro-McCain copy is the handiwork of, or at least due in large part to Ron Fournier. The well known straight news reporter is now in charge of the AP's Washington bureau and openly embracing a new journalistic style that involves "cutting through the clutter."

Michael Calderone has a piece in the Politico that details the editorial change and gets some reactions to it. James Taranto, of the country's nuttiest op-ed board, is quoted arguing that given the abundance of political opinion writing the AP should "should emphasize what they're especially good at, namely impartial reporting."

Presumably it's not the pro-McCain stuff that bothers Taranto as much as the AP's overarching and pervasive liberal bias. (While conservatives tend to believe that literally all mainstream news outlets except Fox are indistinguishable from Daily Kos, they consider the AP an especially bad offender.) But regardless of the reasoning, he's completely right about this. The AP has gone amazingly bad, and Fournier should be sacked as soon as possible.

Of course, he was just recently promoted so that's probably not going to happen. The AP will have brought John McCain so many donuts by the time this thing is over.